Department of English

This thesis argues that the literary works of the 1920s, Jean Toomer’s Cane and Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, use nonchronological structural narratives and concurrent spaces and timelines to portray human consciousness and the reality of the human experience. I discuss literary critics and philosophers, such as Georg Lukacs and Gerard Genette, and their theoretical concepts of anachronies and nonlinearity to understand how I apply anachronism to nonchronological or temporally-ambiguous structures in a narrative and what particular effect this has on the novel as a whole. I apply the term anachronism to a particular method of structuring a narrative—structural anachronism—by looking at vignettes or nonchronological segments within a narrative form, as well as the artistic act of structuring of the narrative in the 1920s (analyzing the larger themes and meanings from the author and historical period). Moreover, I ground my analysis with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and of the chronotope, applying a similar understanding of Bakhtin’s rhetoric to the structure, as well as reviewing the sociopolitical and economic context of when these novels were written. Jean Toomer and Willa Cather’s novels therefore characterize ways to try and understand what it is like to live in the 1920s by reevaluating methods of organizing narrative structures.